Another reason to upgrade [LWN.net]

Another reason to upgrade

Posted Jun 1, 2006 17:41 UTC (Thu) by jenro (subscriber, #7024)
Parent article: Ubuntu Dapper and the distribution business

Once the system works, any sort of software change offers downtime and the risk of problems, but little in the way of advantages - except, of course, for security fixes.

This is not always true.

If you have more than one "copy" of your system, and must install new "copies" over a longer period of time, even your long-time-support-distro won't help you, because as time goes by it will be difficult to buy new hardware to run the than aged distro on it. At that point you have three choices:

Switch to a newer distro for the new systems only.
Upgrade the old systems to the distro, you use on the new systems.
Whenever you must switch distros, buy new hardware for all installed systems.

#1 leads to a maintainence nightmare, #3 is probably far to expensive, so #2 is the only way to go.

The company I work for, made the mistake not to make any plans for option #2. Now we are stuck with 5 different distros ranging from S.u.S.E. 4.2 to SUSE 9.2 and the need for another newer distro clearly in sight. The oldest hardware is about 10 years old, and - alas - still is not showing any signs of falling apart.

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